Database that accesses a website.?

Question

Hi Guys

What application should I use that is able to automatically access a website to gather information? Basically I have a database that completes calculations for me; however I have to manually gather the parameters from a website and input these into my database. What I would like is have an application that will take my input say the name of a product, access the website, add this name into a search box on a website, complete the search and then extract the desired information from the web page returning the results to my application to complete the calculation thus presenting me with the result. This is a little out of my depth but I’m willing to learn no matter how complicated the software. Cheers for your help.

Answer 1

You're not looking for a database. You need to write an application that will go and get data from web pages and then stuff these into a database. i.e. you need to build a "crawler" or "scraper", then drop the results into some database such as MySQL.